PAUL Mason was in his element at the weekend. The former TV reporter who spent years on our screens predicting imminent revolution just about everywhere has taken to the stage to examine why it never actually happened.

His play, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, traced the fiercely opinionated Mr Mason’s years of covering various world events. Mr Mason, erstwhile Trotskyist turned journalist, used to rampage around Europe in pursuit of the ultimate story of post-crash austerity.

Like every good leftist he was ready to predict a revolution that never quite took place. His breathless, exuberant Newsnight reports felt like broadcasts from some dystopian coalface of truth: revolution everywhere! The rise of Syriza in Greece, defying those faceless German bankers, even comparing them to the occupying Nazis of 1941! Podemos in Spain! Portugal! Ireland! Even Scotland was flecked momentarily with his revolutionary zeal, during the closing seconds of the referendum campaign in 2014.

Unfortunately for Mr Mason, the anti-austerity revolutions never quite happened. Yes, digital media has fuelled dissent, made it easier to promote change, and connected the “networked” protest movement. But its influence, upon which he puts so much store, can be over-sold. There was no Grexit, no rash of country bankruptcies, few major defaults. Greece remains in the EU, and even within the Eurozone, and the riots subsided.

Indeed, it turned out only one country has been rash enough to vote to leave the European Union, and for quite difference reasons. Brexit may have been supported by many ordinary people unhappy with austerity, but this very British “revolution” is being pushed by right-wing Tories and their fellow-travellers who dream of a low-tax, free market Britain. Workers’ rights are way down their priority list, unless you mean the right to demand lower immigration and to land the last ton of cod out of the North Sea, unfettered by Brussels regulation.

The media often becomes over-excited, of course, regardless of its politics. For every radical enthusiast like Paul Mason there is a right wing flipside advocating a different kind of uprising. Web publications like Breitbart help to “normalise” sinister politics, for example by tapping into Islamophobia and white fear in the United States.

As the so-called Arab Spring spread from Tunisia through Libya and Egypt, it seemed that nothing could stop change. On the left and right, the West was jubilant, at least for a while. Here were Muslim peoples rising up against autocratic rule, corruption and the rest. Today, as we know from the Syrian experience, it is wise to be careful about what you wish for.

Mr Mason is so despairing of conventional democratic reform – and the mainstream media, of course – that he has gone freelance and thrown in his lot with Jeremy Corbyn. The tone of some of his rhetoric suggests that he is back in the trenches of his politics youth, back in the 1980s at Wapping, or Orgreave. Except this time the miners win.

His play was televised by the BBC last weekend. The corporation also broadcast a fascinating Storyville film, The Accidental Anarchist, about a rather different kind of radical, ex-diplomat Carne Ross, who witnessed the ramifications of the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1990s, and served the Foreign Office in post-war Afghanistan.

Using Occupy and other viral, street protests as political backdrop, Mr Ross paints a bleak picture of where we are today. He and Mr Mason share similar analyses of a West that is pockmarked by failure, set to break down in the face of angry young people armed with smart phones and social media accounts, ready to stream live confrontations with riot police everywhere, from Hong Kong to Ankara and beyond.

At the heart of all this are our modern-day attitudes to democracy. What is it good for? Recep Tayyip Erdogan used democracy to award himself more and more autocratic powers in Turkey. Vladimir Putin uses similar means to retain power, and recently voiced the view that he should remain for a long time to come; for the good of Russia, of course.

What happened to the much-lauded Arab Spring? Oppression in Egypt, civil war with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced in Syria, the loss of Libya as a functioning state, ambiguity in Tunisia. And elsewhere in the Middle East? Proxy disputes as Saudi Arabia – possibly the ultimate model of autocracy – aligns its neighbours against Shia Iran. Not much room for Twitter revolutionaries there. The most adept users of digital media have been the decidedly anti-democratic Islamic State.

There is no revolution perhaps because of an inability to define what shape it might take. At the heart of any successful change there has to be positive motivation, something to inspire the troops. All else is simply reaction to circumstances: I’m worse off than I was before the banks screwed everything up, and they’re still getting away with it! Why does this happen? Why has nothing been done about it? And so on.

Away from a reporter’s fevered enthusiasm for street riots and social media, how have the oppressed responded to globalisation, to their being poorer now than the generation before them? Well, not always by championing freedom and democracy. President Trump’s supporters want Muslims kept out of the United States, and a wall to stem Mexican immigration. They want the Chinese to buy American but stop making goods to sell into America. They elected a man who promised them all this nonsense while himself flouting democracy. Last week, just six months into his presidency, Mr Trump was speculating that if the worst comes to the worst he can always pardon himself. Via Twitter, of course, where else?

The real “revolutionaries” have been those who elected Mr Trump and voted for Brexit, in two countries which have long perceived and promoted themselves as strong, stable democratic models. The story of the Arab Spring and the anti-austerity movements of continental Europe has been one of failure and despair. Podemos does not run Spain just as Jeremy Corbyn did not actually win the election.

It is ironic that the cheerleaders of the left promote social media as the platform of dissent, since so much of it is owned by the amoral digital manipulators of Silicon Valley, who sell all of our user data to advertisers and anyone else with a buck. Your local despot may not know exactly where you are as you plan your next street protest, but Google almost certainly does.